When free speech becomes a game of provocation, kids learn that clout beats character—and history gets rewritten in the process. Stalin knew this very well.

For all the recent interest in mythology and glorifying an idealized past, we are out of luck regarding the virtues of people in high places today, whether it’s politics or pop culture.

At least, one could say that pompous men of epic and honor, like France’s Charles de Gaulle or Eisenhower (also, “rough rider” Teddy Roosevelt or even JFK, a WWII war hero), reached the top after showing they were real, principled men of action, demonstrated on the field.

In the arts, one could say the same about war veterans J.R.R. Tolkien, Hemingway, Norman Mailer, Kurt Vonnegut, or the French Romain Gary (who flew for the French Resistance with the RAF’s help) and the way they wrote about the world versus all the whining nowadays.

Compared to them, people at the top today in the US are to Homeric virtue what a TikTok influencer is to the Odyssey—more about going viral than going on a journey of what makes us human.

To keep it short: it’s just not the same, no matter the energy and stakes of the spin doctors making us believe otherwise. Kids have other examples to dream about nowadays, and I’m afraid many aren’t making the cut.

Things not being the same, but rhyming nonetheless

There’s one thing in common among the people I mentioned, who belong to different eras and traditions: they actively opposed actual fascism, whether in their actions, writings, political stance, or all of the above.

Yet, for some reason, many people think nowadays that normalizing fascism by cosplaying and lying about the past is something healthy that sort of lets people “decide” by themselves what should be considered reasonable and what’s not acceptable. Those enabling social media to pitch fascism to the masses: it’s not a good idea.

For many reasons, all these characters come to mind when I see the frivolity with which people use denominations of the Interwar period to call names or to glorify eras they know little about. One thing is clear, however: none of the figures mentioned above would have acted with language as frivolously as we see today from the high ranks of society.

This post is addressed to anyone, of course, but especially to parents who, like us, are raising teenage children. I’m a father of two girls and one son still at home, and at this point, it’s evident that some influential people are deceivingly trying to rewrite what’s customarily right and wrong.

That’s fine with me, but others might not be so lucky, especially children who, if you’ve been paying attention, don’t consume any other media that the content filtered through their smartphone lenses. The dopamine loop is working, and it shouldn’t be as bad as it is if punk rock prank-like displays at the top weren’t so engaging.

I’m talking primarily about normalizing bully behavior and telling kids that freedom of speech means, first and foremost, that anyone can say and do what they please, no matter how deranged, and undermining any sense of decency, often attacking others with no consequences.

A childish perspective of maximalist free speech vs. self-restraint

Now, imagine that many top personalities (see, for example, Kanye “Ye” West’s behavior on X recently) decide to torpedo any intent to keep a minimum decency decorum and share their mental outbreaks with the world.

If it all feels a bit like a parody of Borat (aka reality trolling comedy), it’s not. It isn’t funny. Like the Goya black painting, Saturn Devouring His Son, the internet is devouring itself. It feels like the Charles Manson moment of our era of excess and unseriousness.

Kids will notice, and one of the things they are beginning to process is that some people cannot only get ahead but thrive by bulldozing any rules, which is what education is trying to teach kids not to, for controlling one’s reactions and cultivating creative thinking are key pillars y becoming an autonomous adult (we tell ourselves). Or so they were.

I don’t find it realistic to tell children not to use the internet on their own, nor to ban TikTok, etc., even when the risks are exposed succinctly (see, for example, Jonathan Haidt). But, unlike we’re planning to live with our growing children like the Amish, they live as much (if not more, due to compulsory education) as we do within society, and they will use the same tools that disseminate the mentioned rants to inform themselves about the world.

As thinkers like Hannah Arendt noted, when societal red lines are moving in real-time, people simply adapt (that is, if they don’t belong to any of the scapegoated). Many will say they are too busy to notice or care—until it affects them in a very precise, quotidian situation.

If online discourse gets free-wheeled and popular influencers normalize things such as hate speech and violence, the ratio of signal vs. noise will tilt even more towards noise; some people will manage; others, like teens and people at risk, will need to develop on their own the guardrails that influencers, companies, and governments won’t do for them.

Goodies and baddies

I read with attention Casey Newton’s recent article about Roost, the new open-source online and safety tools that, if adopted by many, could at least filter the obvious abuse, harassment, spam, and bot activity. It could work in the long term, although nobody will tell powerful influencers to stop engaging themselves in some of these activities. But, in the current zeitgeist, Roost could get roosted like a paper straw.

This post isn’t about politics; anything happening now has been cooking in the pot for at least one generation, and wealthy and highly educated countries aren’t immune to it, and yes, institutional dysfunction plays a role. (Aside note: being from Catalonia and knowing a thing or two about Italy and other places, I’ve been reading and following populism from the left, right, and nationalists for most of my adulthood, so nobody can teach me about little Napoleons at this point.)

So even if Caligula himself team-travels and becomes the Emperor, leaving Ye’s X rampage in the dust, it isn’t going to make me fall off the chair any more than what we’re about to see on the world stage. I’m interested, on the contrary, in how this will affect people coming of age in this climate, as they internalize who (according to society) “is winning” and how, and who needs to be scapegoated, what’s right, and what’s a no-go.

All the people complaining in the last years about Newspeak lingo coming from all-things-woke seem to experience amnesia when it comes to calling out the excesses of the current wave of banalization of fascism. I wonder how many of them have grand or great-grandfathers who had to fight in Europe or the Pacific against the real thing. He would explain to them a thing or two.

It’s also a post about understanding that I can’t change the world and the zeitgeist on my own. Acknowledging that, as a father of future adults, I want them to live in a viable society instead of in a world where people only aim to look after themselves, live in gated communities, hire private security, etc. I also agree with Henry Rollins when he says anyone can be “thunderous in your own life, and being cool to the eight people around you? It rubs off. Goodness is viral.”

Though goodness is less viral than memes and breaking rules. Even the skinheads from the 80s and 90s that I met growing up—all of them the most insecure kids, the ones lacking self-esteem—grew to understand that their stances were just a poorly informed, bad idea.

Deconstructing shared values

I thought this wasn’t much to ask, but it’s concerning that powerful people who can influence public opinion directly are willing to use playbook manipulative techniques to spread turmoil and suspicion and, in the midst of the chaos they themselves spur on, get ahead with their most substantial objectives.

It shouldn’t be difficult to criticize institutional systems without following a playbook that resembles too much the Agitprop from Interwar Europe. And yes, let’s remember how Marinetti’s Futurism influenced fascism in Italy.

This mechanism, which we all understand, isn’t only affecting the institutions but also the way the youngest see society and understand what they can and can’t do, what’s right and wrong, what’s true and false, what’s permissible and what’s not. On the one hand, anybody powerful enough can do and say whatever (the more deranged, the more popular and engaging), and the rest are supposed to look the other way while this happens. When asked as parents, we should at least remember where the lines were not long ago (until those comparative factors get blurry as well).

I find it especially shocking and condescending when I see opinion leaders dismissing it all as something lacking any real substance because they think they’re still getting away with the fundamentals they were aiming at. I’ve seen this before: when parents act permissively with entitled children who refuse to grow and go rogue, causing harm along the way. They’ll cover up, deny, or invent just to “protect.”

To those thinking they’ll be able to protect their own children from this evolution of morality and customs, you might be up for a surprise. Many celebrate the fall in disgrace of the policies that went too far trying to spin the importance of identity, and I’m not a fan myself of the long American obsession with putting people in statistical identity boxes.

As a European who’s lived in France (a country that officially opposes communitarianism and multiculturalism with Republican Universalism, which is basically Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s social contract theory meets the novels of Victor Hugo), I think there are way more productive things to do instead of investing in telling people about the differences amongst each other.

Banality of evil

But the problem of mocking people and celebrating the end of the DEI derangement or whatever is that those enabling these changes aren’t looking for the French Revolution-style enlightened ideals of Universalism (like in France and post-World War II Europe in general): they will substitute old identitarian tokens for their own champion causes.

In other words, one perceived excess will be replaced without real consensus by another extreme, and the educated majority will keep thinking that their world is more polarized in fundamental things than it actually is.

If this hypothesis holds, I think we’re seeing the beginning of societal instability in a vital country for the world, and anyone is concerned because we all will be affected—especially our kids.

I’m presuming that, as long as crypto keeps growing and the main favored meme stocks hold, few people will publicly express any concern about the popularity of toxic speech and how this connected with the youngest and disaffected in the last few years, both in the US and abroad. But even those who believe that things are going their way should ask themselves if that’s really so. Teenagers are paying attention and can normalize what they see at the top.

I respect the maximalist interpretation of free speech in the US. It works as long as influential people don’t torpedo it by abusing it childishly, which has been happening in the last few years. Let’s consider, for example, the banalization of Nazism and anything along what it stood for as it dismantled the Weimar Republic and started the scalation towards World War II.

Most people who experienced the horrors of that war and postwar are gone, as many adults today were born even after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Iron Curtain, along with the Soviet Union.

While we still discuss the echoes of that war, which shaped the postwar, the Cold War, and the era of prosperity and relative peace known as Pax Americana, many things have happened since, from China’s rise as the world’s factory to multipolarity and geopolitical uncertainty, especially felt by long-time American allies, both in Europe and the Pacific.

Slave workers collecting iron ore in Narvik, Norway, 1944

This reality doesn’t make (shouldn’t make) Nazism banal, let alone cool. Since I hear kids commenting on what Ye says on X and what Elon Musk has to say to the German society about collective guilt and their past, sometimes I wonder whether this isn’t all some sort of gigantic joke. There’s no need to produce contemporary alternatives of Monty Python sketches or Beavis and Butt-Head, for reality has long caught up, and it’s as funny to read the serious news nowadays.

I’m not sure, however, that the carnival of banalization will be welcomed by all informed societies the same way. Since I brought up the question of banalizing horror and suffering during World War II, I’d like to annotate a few personal observations I’ve witnessed in three different locations during the last few years: the Berlin Wall Memorial Museum on Berlin’s Bernauer Strasse; Winston Churchill’s Cabinet bunker under Westminster (we did a video on our visit); and the Lofoten Krigsminne Museum in Svolvaer, a tiny private museum that collected Nazi paraphernalia over the decades in the Lofoten Archipelago, Nordic Norway—a strategic place occupied by the Germans to guarantee access to the iron ore around Narvik.

Generations after World War II, it’s very easy to take for granted some of the overall achievements by post-war leaders and societies as a whole; it wasn’t perfect, but the shared, democratic systems of national and international checks and balances made a majority of people in North America, Europe, Japan, South Korea, and Oceania healthier and more prosperous.

Over the decades, many institutions became dysfunctional, and democratic systems should be able to reform themselves—or at least this was the shared consensus in these societies. Fast forward, give people smartphones and ways to live in their own information silos, and all of a sudden the consensus is broken for many. The further apart from the traumatic 1930s and 1940s, the more people seem to think that what happened then isn’t relevant anymore.

Yet, we still live in the same hyper-technical world, one in which full-blown instability and war can lead to destruction or even nuclear conflagration. As said by Albert Camus in 1945, there’s no return to innocence after the Holocaust and Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That’s why soft power (now being dismantled by its main promoter, the USA) came to become important. The alternative was risking a return to the Stone Age.

Not your common, very beautiful, very flashy, wall

So, when in October 2017, we were on a trip to Berlin with the kids, and I made sure to book some time to visit the (free) Berlin Wall Memorial Museum at Bernauer Strasse.

The museum itself is at a place along the old wall that separated the city during the most dangerous years of the Cold War. A country, but also families and individuals, were separated for decades due to geopolitics they couldn’t control or have a say in. This, of course, came after losing the war and facing devastation at every conceivable level, also spiritually.

The reconstruction and healing were difficult, always provisory, and at times erratic. Then came the reunification. Still, many Germans visit places like that museum and, as I observed myself, acknowledge with respect and empathy.

Now, fast forward a little longer, and people like Elon Musk are lecturing Germans that they should stop with the BS about the past and forge ahead with their apparent blood and soil instincts. Very few Germans—no matter their age or political leanings—found this clever, constructive, or mature.

Why dismissing the past and becoming again a belligerent power against other European powers, like Germany should do according to people with Musk’s apparent political leanings, could benefit Germans greatly, is something that would be connected to the prospects of other nations within the European Union (a superstructure which, to nobody’s surprise, many would like to see dismantled asap).

Five years after our family visit to the Bernauer Strasse memorial, Kirsten and I appointed a visit with the people responsible for the Churchill War Rooms, the underground bunker (now a museum) used by Churchill’s cabinet to remain functional during World War II air raids. Even if the Londoners affected by the Blitz are dying of age, we were glad to realize that many people visit the museum to understand that it was no joke, no matter what memes on X promote.

Things past, things present, things future

Finally, in the summer of 2024, we visited Lofoten, a picturesque archipelago in Norway’s coastal Arctic. The place was once Europe’s cod fishing epicenter and its climate is milder than it should be based on latitude due to the North Atlantic Current. Since we were visiting during the never-ending days of summer, there were as many things to do in one day as one wanted, or at least we had that feeling.

I dedicated one free afternoon to visiting Svolvaer’s Krigsmine Museum, a private collection that began by collecting World War II paraphernalia from the area when the Third Reich heavily occupied it, hosting thousands of prisoners of war used as slave workers, a majority of them coming from Ukraine, then a part of the Soviet Union. I talked to one of the museum’s volunteers and spent a good deal of time there.

There are places in the world where Nazi jokes are not funny.

I’m doing my best to see by myself and show my kids the consequences of forgetting how things can go very wrong and escalate very quickly when individuals within democratic societies decide to look the other way and leave the task of reform to technocrats dismissing any idea of respect to checks and balances.

The potential price to pay is too high. What one will save by dismantling the soft power that benefited the US indirectly in the world may be lost in many other ways, including a new, more dangerous type of cronyism. As an observer of the American experiment, I’m aware of my limitations.

The banality of unimportant, obscure posts

Sometime in the future, many will manage to blame others for the apparent issues derived from the policies being enabled now because people are being told on social media and popular podcasts that conflicts of interest are a thing of the past. Someone attuned to the new regime may find a Newspeak term to define what’s really going on instead.

The president, the House, and the Senate will be on this. Meanwhile, some of us are making sure to ask our kids what’s going on on their social media corner (whether they’re allowed to access it freely or not, for they will access their friends’ devices if they’re prevented from doing so at home).

We may discover that Ye’s recent derangement is more a feature of the new times than a bug. There hasn’t been a moment in recent history in which scapegoating has been riper to be unleashed on a massive scale. It could flood the feeds as soon as it is needed.